Erica Jong’s Sappho’s Leap:(Re-)constructing Gender and Authorship through Sappho

For contemporary female authors, Sappho is a literary forebear who is both a model for women’s writing and a reminder of the ways in which women have been excluded from the literary canon. Poet and novelist Erica Jong takes up the challenge to gender and authorship posed by Sappho in her 2003 novel, Sappho’s Leap. Jong weaves Sappho’s poetry into her fiction to both complement the Sapphic tradition and to supplant it, proving that female poetry —and authorship— is alive and well, with Sappho continually mediated by and validating each subsequent writer in the female tradition. In addition, Jong’s emphasis on the authentic expression of sexual desire as a bridge to authorship transcends gender binaries, turning Sappho’s Leap into a study of authorship that is not confined to gender. This enables Jong to shift the debate away from the sense of burden placed on female authors post- Sappho and to transform her Sappho into a positive role model for all authors, turning the focus towards a poetics of passion and away from prescriptive assumptions of the relationship between gender and authorship.

Critical Approaches to Ageing Body Politics in the Works of Erica Jong

The ways we read our bodies and bodily transformations are deeply inscribed in cultural meanings that vary across different historical times and societies. Even if the desire to achieve culturally imposed beauty standards and ideals is relevant to all age groups, anxieties about bodily decline become more pronounced as we approach the final stages of our lives. Physical changes are never just manifestations of cellular and organic loss, but can also be a source of troubled identifies and fragmented personalities caused by the mismatch between our external appearance and the inner perception of the self. This paper offers the longitudinal analysis of female processes of ageing from age-studies and feminist perspectives, as depicted in the works of Erica Jong, a contemporary American writer. It uncovers significant aspects of the pressures older women are subjected to in order to look more appealing in youth-oriented cultures, and demonstrates that the human body is often regarded as a conflicting site of perpetual ambiguities and troubled feelings caused by physical decay.

IN HER OWN WORDS: THE SEMANTICS OF FEMALE AUTHORSHIP IN ANCIENT GREECE, FROM SAPPHO TO NOSSIS

What we call things is important—it reveals what we think about the world. What we call ourselves, however, is even more important. It reveals ideas and assumptions about identity, gender, community. It helps us to see where we fit in in society; what we understand our purpose, our role to be; the kinds of activities we undertake. In a history where women have been largely barred from higher-paying, traditionally male occupations, the way in which women in particular use terminology to lay claim to skills and expertise in counterpoint to a generally male-dominant culture speaks volumes about the ways in which women see themselves and their relationship to their work. As Erica Jong puts it in her feminist essay,The Artist as Housewife, ‘naming is a form of self-creation’.